Mobile Nation
~ Jonathan Clancy
Here is the written summary for my presentation on Gaming Platforms based on the case studies put forward in Mobile Nation.
I’ve provided links to some of the mobile games I will be referencing.
(Some are just extended play throughs).
Proposed questions are at the end.
The Mobile Nation
Video games are good for your soul.
- James Gee, Literacy Scholar
The studies and discussions put forward by Mobile Nation focus both on the unique design and functionality of mobile games, as well as putting forward a broader discussion regarding gaming literacy and how playing, understanding and designing games can create a crucial way for us to analyze and function in the real world.
The Mobile Nation Conference held in OCAD was put together to gather in one place both people working in the mobile phone industry and academics researching this ‘booming economy’ so they could discuss the direction in which mobile technology was headed. The various insights and predictions at this conference were used to help create the book, gathering information from mobile and gaming industry professionals from Hong Kong, Finland, Canada, and India to name just a few. It also gathered perspectives from insiders across a wide spectrum, such as Scratch Anarchists, Urban Activists, Politicians etc.
Two professionals in the mobile phone and gaming industry, Martha Ladley and Philip Beesley, edited this book in order to put forward an analysis on the proliferating importance of the mobile phone as both an extension of us and our way of life. A part of the book’s discussions involve the evolvement of games on phones and androids, their functionality and how game literacy on a mobile platform can shape us. The editors created the book as a ‘Snapshot of what’s coming’.
Today Android and IOS games are consistently growing in popularity and evolving in their design and gameplay, making mobile or on-the-go games a unique platform all of it’s own. One of the most successful companies Creative Mobile has over 250 million mobile gamers for theirs gaming apps alone. While these are largely car racing simulators that borrow from the standard console platform, there are many others that fully inhabit and explore the unique scope of play that comes with a mobile device.
Gaming Literacy
A Model for Literacy in the 21st Century?
Gaming Literacy, a concept proposed by Ladley, analyzes the significant impact games could have on the education and development of our society. This concept is broken up into three factors; System, Play and Design.
In this analysis Ladley references a term by Dutch Historian and philosopher Johann Huizinga, known as The Magic Circle.
The magic circle represents the idea that games take place within limits of time and space, and are therefor self-contained systems of meaning. A chess king for example is just a figurine on a coffee table, but when a game of chess starts, it suddenly acquires all kinds of very specific strategic, psychological and even narrative meanings.
Likewise a fist in rock-paper-scissors has a fixed meaning. Golden hoops in Sonic the Hedgehog have a fixed meaning of being rewards. Turtles in Super Mario have a fixed meaning of being inherently bad.
In Nightmare Malaria, a game in which you play as a little girl trapped inside her own infected bloodstream, Mosquitos have a fixed meaning of fear and danger, while nets are an essential tool for protection. The game places us within its magic circle to give us a fantastical but nonetheless immersive understanding of this disease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uugoIC5sfQs
Nightmare Malaria
The Magic Circle therefor emphasizes meanings that are intrinsic and interior to games.
However Gaming Literacy, as argued by Ladley, turns this inward-looking focus inside out and argues that the meanings in a game’s magic circle are present outside the circle as well.
To clarify Gaming Literacy is not necessarily about the context of serious games designed to teach you subject matter, or persuasive games that are designed with a message or social agenda such as Nightmare Malaria. Nor is it about training game designers. Rather it is about the influence the very mechanics of playing or designing video games has on us, and our approach towards the outside world.
Ladley argues that System, Play and Design all represent kinds of literacies that are not being addressed today with traditional education. Together they stand for a new set of cognitive, creative and social skills.
‘Gaming a system’ means finding hidden short cuts and cheats and bending and modifying rules in order to move through the system more efficiently. This means we can misbehave when gaming but we can also, in the process, change that system for the better.
Day Of The Figurines – Pioneer in Mobile Gaming Possibilities
Mobile Phones are increasingly viewed as a carrier for entertainment, rather than a functional tool. But when it comes to games or any other app, it shouldn’t be just a matter of taking something from one media and shrinking it down. Beesley argues that designers must think strategically about what it means to be mobile with a device and what level of information can be digested by people on-the-go. Games therefor cannot be just a conversion of one media to another, they must be specifically designed for the mobile medium.
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/day-of-the-figurines/
Day of The Figurines
An early example, given by the book, of modifying a game for the mobile phone platform (pre-android) is Day of The Figurines, launched by Game Lab in 2006. This was a text-based game in which the game unfolded over 24 days, with each day representing an hour in the game’s timeline. Players got to choose a figurine that would become a part of a model town and would begin play by receiving a text informing them of events that affected their figurine and the other figurines in the town. You would then text back a decision, which would include where you moved in the town and how you would react with the other players. How the players responded to these events and each other would have an incalculable effect on the town and the games results.
Over a thousand players took part, receiving a minimum of one text a day as the town hit various changing scenarios including a Scandinavian metal band causing a riot and an Arabic speaking army invading. The game nicely molded with the mobile phone platform as it could be accessed at any time and could be played in quick bursts.
Days of The Figurines also betrayed the basic premise of any game in that it had no real objective, rather it was an experiment to see how these decisions would shape the town. It also, consequently, invited the participants to openly think about and discuss with the others why they were playing the game?
Beesley references this as part of a new way of thinking in designing these mobile platform games, known as empathy-based design.
Day of The Figurines gave a whole other scope to mobile gaming possibilities, not just from its pragmatic use of the device’s texting mechanism, but by actively inviting an awareness for the players as to what purpose they had in participating in this game and what they wanted to achieve through it, rather than the usual goal-following set out for them by a typical console game.
This brings us to the first part of Ladley’s Gaming literacy…
Systems
Contemporary thinkers, Stephen Graham and Malcolm Gladwell are increasingly proposing systems-based thinking as the best way to understand a range of complex subjects from media to society to history and culture.
Being able to successfully understand and navigate, modify
and design systems will be more and more linked to how we
learn, work, play, and live as engaged world citizens. It stresses
the importance of dynamic relationships, not fixed facts.
- Ladley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCxS4MGMEgQ
Silent Age – Is a game in which you must navigate through a 2 dimensional world, interact with various characters and make choice in order to solve a groovy time-travel mystery.
Games are intrinsically systematic, they all have mathematical substratum and a set of rules that lye under its surface. Unlike film or other media, there is a clarity of formal structure to games; Their rules. Games are therefor uniquely suited to teach systems literacy.
Any game is a kind of miniature artificial system, bounded and defined by the game rules that create the game’s magic circle. In Silent Age you are bounded by the 2 dimensional world and the point and click format to explore and navigate through the game. When someone plays through this video game they uncover for themselves strategies that are more effective.
Likewise, for people creating game systems, playtesting, modifying the rules, and playtesting again, are all examples of how games naturally and powerfully lend themselves to systems literacy. Ladley argues that in theory this set of practices, unique to video game design, could help us modify and reconfigure other systems such as politics, economics or education.
http://thesilentage.com/blog/2014/01/making-backgrounds/
Silent Age – Breakdown
Second Principle of Game literacy. Play.
Play is our physical interpretation and adaptation of rules set into motion and, in doing so play, transcends the systems from which it arises.
When people learn to play video games,
they are learning a new literacy.”
– James Paul Gee, Literary Scholar
In the magic circle, rules are rigid and closed. When we enter the magic circle and agree to follow the rules, play happens. Rules are closed and fixed, play is improvisational and uncertain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT3HxcZDLYo
Prune, a bizarre game of the gardening variety- sort of.
In it the system structure is designed so the plant will grow out, sometimes into dangerous areas. You as a player must cut, trim or adjust its growth direction to keep the plant from being destroyed. The game is very flexible in how the plant grows and where you can cut it, opening up your ability to improvise and strategize around the game’s rigid platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gete61IxkPo
Bounden trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbj6uL_PA4
Actual bounden game play
In Bounden to replicate the dance-moves in the game you and your partner, whilst both holding onto the same phone, must learn to adjust and co-ordinate with each other, create your own rhythm and physically move together to play within the game’s structure. This physical aspect and co-ordination allows for a much more personal approach to the game, as you and your partner must learn between yourselves how to work together using your bodies as well as the minimal controls in the game. It is also a perfect example of creating a game exclusively for the mobile platform.
Ladley also sees an importance in these games allowing us to not just play within it’s structure but to also play with the structure itself.
Games are not just about following the rules, but also
about breaking them. When rules are bent, broken and
transformed what new structures will arise?
- Ladley
The coded systems in a video game only become meaningful when they are inhabited, explored and manipulated by people, which brings us back to the argument about whether this can transcend into reconfiguring systems outside of games too.
For my trouble I have yet to find a mobile game that lets you break it’s rules, if anyone does please let me know. Although ‘’ does make an argument for players predicting and finding patterns in the algorithm of the game itself, referencing a game like “Quake” where ‘the player may eventually notice that under such and such condition the enemies will appear from the left, i.e. [The Player] will literally reconstruct a part of the algorithm responsible for the game play’. But otherwise in a literal sense of rule breaking there isn’t a game just yet that allows you as a player to adjust its gameplay to the point that you reconfigure it entirely. Unless we want to include programmed cheats but these are made available by the game and still abide by its rules and systems.
Play doesn’t take structures for granted rather it plays
with them, modifying, transgressing and reinventing
and will be imperative for innovation in the coming
century. Play will increasingly inform how we learn
work and create culture.
-Ladley
In Mobile Nation Ladley and her crew focused on the use of mobile games or applications exclusively in regard to public parks. This focused on the average park goers needs such as skate boarding, dog walking, tai chi practitioner, business people lunching, lovers consorting. Ladley was also surprisingly concerned that the designs of these apps needed to be engaging but not so complex or immersive that lead to inattention of your surroundings.
While there are plenty of skateboarding, dog walking and tai chi games there are few games that utilize the specific surroundings of being in a park. Perhaps this could be a later phase in open-ended mobile game platforms, designed for specific types of surroundings but it illustrates the ‘dream big’ ideology of Beesley in that the games are being designed in sync with our every day activities.
Open Ended Mobile Platforms
Due to their very nature mobile games have an increased opportunity to involve interaction and movement in their play, as well as open ended platforms and objectives, allowing them to further open up the magic circle around us.
https://www.ingress.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rYjlxqypM
Ingress – Augmented reality mobile game
Ingress, connected coincidentally with the concerns of Ladley in regards distracting us from our surroundings, openly invites players to become more aware of them and to actively pursue sites and destinations within their area. The game declares in it’s opening that it is ‘More than a game. It lives and breathes all around you. All you have to do is look, let us open your eyes’.
It even takes the time to remind you that ‘You can switch it off and go back to your lives’, as though aware of the unlimited immersion this game could potentially cause.
In this game, real life and the game are morphed, as you actively take yourself to places of cultural significance such as museums or statues so you can capture portals created by an alien race and link them over other geographical locations. The real world is your platform. The application utilizes the Google Maps and GPS on your phone to determine your position and notify you of portals in your area. It is open-ended and involves teamwork and communication with others to capture and navigate the linking of these portals.
In Ingress the magic circle is literally opened up. The player’s literal surroundings change their meaning through this game; A statue or historic building is now a site for a portal and thus symbolizes adventure and great mystery. Likewise it makes movement and interaction with other players crucial, as the game creates a world in which you and the other participants are now an army whose co-ordination is essential to help your surrounding world from destruction.
Which brings us to the final element of Gaming Literacy.
Design.
The rules of play, design is the process by which a
designer creates a context, to be encountered by a
participant, from which meaning emerges. Designers
create context that in turn creates signification.
- Katie Salen
In video game design you are creating a set of possibilities, which can be explored in the game through play, metaplay and transformative play.
Video game design, unlike many other forms of design requires a wide variety of knowledge put into practice involving math and logic, aesthetics and story telling, writing and communication, visual audio design, human psychology and behavior, understanding culture through art, entertainment and popular media.
Thus the very process of designing a game creates a multi-modal form of learning that educators and literary theorists have been talking about for years. Design of a mobile phone game can also further appreciate and utilize various aspects of how we play a game and how we use our mobile phone features such as GPS, Google Maps, Bluetooth, camera and alerts.
Building off the back of Ingress’ multiplayer, augmented reality, platform the most anticipated mobile game coming this year is arguably Pokemon Go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go is multiplayer IOS and Android game, uses location on your phone to map out geo-catch points, which contain pokemon. Your phone notifies you where the pokemon is hiding and you can then see them in the area around you through your phone’s screen. Your phone also now essentially becomes a pokeball and is used to store and catch these creatures.
The game promises the ability to interact with others so you can battle or trade with friends. It also comes with additional accessories such as a pokewatch, a wrist-tracking device that vibrates to notify you if a pokemon is nearby.
It also has communal based Boss battles, in which apparently masses of people in an area can join forces to catch (or kill?) a super powerful pokemon. Unclear if these events will be activated, exclusively, by the company or if you can create and organize your own? Either way it certainly entertains Ladley’s concept of the magic circle extending or even being turned inside out for the participants.
Just like Ingress’ tagline ‘It’s time to move’, Pokemon Go by its very title embellishes the movement, and on -the-go accessability and immersion that could become quintessential to the mobile gaming experience.
But Ladley further stresses the importance of people being thought design of video games rather than just experiencing it.
She is involved with a company called Gamelab which has created number of gaming literacy projects and uses a program called Gamestar mechanic, which will help youths learn about game design by letting them create and modify simple games. In 2007 they opened up the Gamelab Institute of Play.
According to Ladley’s Game Literacy Theory with regards Design, the understanding of systems and design of video games can transcend into our understanding of systems and meanings within them. While the playing of these games can teach us how to adapt and improvise strategically in a way that can show us the functionality of these systems and how they can be changed.
Conclusion and Questions
Our behaviours are increasingly being taken into account
in the design of mobile services and the services offered,
but also mobile devices are having an effect on our
behaviour as well, so there’s a real conversation going
back and forth between opportunities and sociability.
- Philip Beesley
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/iperg/
Blast Theory, creators of Days of Figurines, are becoming the pioneers of what are coined pervasive games; Games which extend in time, space or special effects. They are determined to utilize the developments of mobile devices and their functions to create games that will occupy a different place in the lives of players than traditional games, with games that can be played across whole countries or cities and where even non-players can inadvertently be part of the game. Examples such as Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke, encourage players to use objects, locations and people around them to play and navigate through these pervasive games, illustrating the greatest argument for the potential of Johann Huizinga’s magic circle being turned inside out.
The physical nature of these [Mobile phones] is increasingly
close to our bodies and that means they are really potent
because they are increasingly becoming a part of us.
– Philip Beesley
Beesley theorizes that mobile devices are becoming extensions of ourselves, and therefor should these mobile games continue to adapt into our movements and surroundings they may be able to create a greater scope for the magic circle and, in doing so, let us turn it inside out and utilize this ‘playing’ mentality into the various structures and systems all around us.
In the coming century the way we live and learn, work
and relax and communicate and create is going to more
and more resemble how we play games. Gaming literacy
offers valuable model for what it will mean to become
literate, educated and successful in this playful world.
-Martha Ladley
What does the current scope of mobile platform games have with regard creating interaction or community between users in everyday life, circa Pokemon Go and Ingress? Is it just within the game play or does it translate outside of the magic circle?
Are mobile games currently utilizing the standards of system, play and design that could reshape our way of understanding, teaching and redefining the structures all around us? What ability would game design programs, such as at Gamelab, have on younger minds to re-evaluate social, political or mechanical structures and possibly change them?
How much ability do games have to make users break and re-mold the rules or even the games structure, as proposed by Ladley? And if it were possible would this translate into our everyday lives and would that consciously or unconsciously get put into practice by us?
For people creating game systems, playtesting, modifying the rules, and playtesting again, are all examples of how games naturally and powerfully lend themselves to systems literacy. Can this translate into refiguring, modifying or playing through other systems in our world such as political systems, educational systems or economic systems? Is there really a correlation or should the education system adapt game literacy to purposefully teach children how to configure and redefine systems?
Bibliography
Beesley, Philip and Ladley, Martha. Mobile Nation Riverside Architectural Press, Canada, 2008.
Paul Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, , 2003.
Online Articles
http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/mobile-nation-people-and-their-devices/4552
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/iperg/
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/ivy4evr/
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/day-of-the-figurines/
Video Game Footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxfRIg9SMV0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uugoIC5sfQs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCxS4MGMEgQ
http://thesilentage.com/blog/2014/01/making-backgrounds/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT3HxcZDLYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gete61IxkPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbj6uL_PA4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rYjlxqypM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs